In the Foreword to last year's volume of Lexikos, Dr. J.C.M.D. du Plessis informed us that that volume was going to be his last as Editor of our journal. He announced that the baton would henceforth be passed on to a rotating triumvirate: Proff. Elsabé Taljard, Danie Prinsloo, and Rufus Gouws. We welcome them, and especially Elsabé, who was found willing to be next in line. Elsabé takes over at a moment when Lexikos has reached top speed, and as in a 4 x 100 relay race, the task is just as much a skill event as it is a speed event. Johan, who had been editing Lexikos for no less than fourteen of the first twenty years, went from strength to strength with each new volume. With Volume 20, our Editor-par-Excellence put a magnificent capstone to an outstanding tenure. Weighing in at 800 pages, Johan's capstone simply outgrew the concept of a single journal issue, catapulting it to the most valued library shelves, where it now rubs shoulders with the heftiest of dictionaries - quite appropriate for our discipline.

It is largely due to the expert touch of the previous editor, Dr. J.C.M.D. du Plessis, that Lexikos has established itself during the last 14 years as the journal of choice for both local and international lexicographers. This is borne out by the range of subjects that is represented in Lexikos 21. In this volume, too, the original objectives of Lexikos are embodied.

The lexicons of natural languages are not isomorphic. Reasons for the anisomorphism can be sought on three interrelated planes: language structure, extralinguistic reality, and conceptualisation. Simply put, the relevant differences may reside in the language, the world, the mind, or any combination of these. As a result, what goes under the name of lexicographic equivalence is a rather heterogeneous category. Growing awareness of this fact has resulted over the years in the creation of several tentative typologies of equivalence, one of which is presented below, together with a brief discussion of some strategies for dealing with imperfect equivalence.

The remaining part of the article comprises a detailed analysis of a single problem encountered while preparing a new edition of a bilingual dictionary for Polish learners of English. The task at hand involved choosing a viable counterpart for a (Polish) semantic neologism from among a few (English) equivalence candidates. In the discussion, reference is made both to the metalexicographic categories introduced earlier and to such concepts developed by lexical (especially cognitive) semantics which may prove helpful in capturing the meaning differences between the source-language item and its competing target-language renditions.
This micro-scale dissection of a single specimen demonstrates that we are still some way from being able to classify, let alone deal with, all the instances of imperfect interlingual correspondence that come our way. Persisting in the efforts to advance our understanding of the complex issues covered by the blanket term lexicographic equivalence thus seems crucial for improving the treatment of meaning in bilingual dictionaries.

This article deals with the national dictionary offices of the previous bilingual dispensation, the eleven official national dictionary offices in the present multilingual dispensation, and the future prospects of these offices. It discusses the past dispensation in terms of the need and reasons for the establishment of national dictionary offices, i.e. national lexicography units (NLUs). Attention is given to the prescripts of the National Lexicography Units Bill (1996) for the establishment of NLUs, as well as the transfer of these units from the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology to the Pan South African Language Board. The restructuring of dictionary units that existed prior to the multilingual dispensation is considered, together with the establishment of new dictionary units for the official African languages. The present situation is dealt with by describing the status quo at the NLUs in terms of housing, administration, funding, management, training, computerisation, cooperation, production and the like. The article concludes with some questions and reservations about the future of the NLUs, followed by a number of apposite recommendations.

Addressing equivalence prevails in a dictionary article when all the translation equivalents in the translation equivalent paradigm are represented in the target language examples in the cotext section and each target language example contains a translation equivalent that appears in the translation equivalent paradigm. The disruption of this equivalence takes place as a result of the procedures of underaddressing (when not all the translation equivalents in the translation equivalent paradigm are represented in the target language examples in the cotext section) and overaddressing (when target language examples contain translation equivalents that do not appear in the translation equivalent paradigm). In a polyfunctional bilingual dictionary addressing equivalence represents the ideal addressing structure between translation equivalent paradigm and cotext section. In Afrikaans bilingual dictionaries, addressing equivalence is rare, but this seems to be the case in bilingual dictionaries of other languages also. Although instances of underaddressing can be neutralised relatively easily, a deeper investigation into overaddressing has found that most target language examples that seem to be symptomatic of overaddressing indeed contribute to communicative equivalence in spite of a would-be deficient addressing structure. This is because these target language examples do not function as true examples (that illustrate the behaviour of translation equivalents), but are in fact cotextual specifiers that represent a functional procedure of contextual translation equivalent exclusion, through which the target user is advised of the non-usability of the translation equivalents offered in the translation equivalent paradigm in certain contexts. This finding requires a re-appreciation of addressing structures in general and the principle of addressing equivalence in particular.

Interest in specialized lexicography has been propelled both by the development of LSP communication in academic circles and by the consolidation of function-based approaches to lexicography that have identified the existence of several user types, e.g., experts, semi-experts and interested laypersons, and use situations, typically cognitive-oriented and communicative-oriented (Bergenholtz and Tarp, 2003, 2004). This paper follows suit and elaborates on the selection of Spanish equivalents in a particular dictionary project: the Diccionario Inglés-Español de Contabilidad, one of the Accounting dictionaries. This dictionary aims to satisfy the needs of translators (primary user group), accountants and financial experts (secondary user group), as well as students of accountancy and translation, journalists, and interested laypersons (tertiary user group). It addresses the issue as a lexicographical problem and makes comments on the decisions taken by elaborating on three lexicographical principles that take into consideration the nature of lexicography, the technical options the Internet offers, and the defining characteristics of specialized discourse: relevance, proscription and recreation.

Despite some heroic efforts over the past few years, Lusoga remains mostly underdeveloped. It is under continuous pressure from more prestigious languages, such as the neighbouring Luganda and especially the only official language in Uganda, English. Lusoga is undergoing rapid language shifts, with new concepts entering the language daily. Ironically, this process is taking place before Lusoga has even been properly reduced to writing. There is no single official orthography that is truly being enforced; people who do write, write as they think fit. Language data is needed for the production of reliable reference works. In the absence of a substantial body of published material in Lusoga, the researcher can resort to recording and transcribing the living language. This opens Pandora's box, in that spoken language (which is meant to be heard, and is typically less formal) is far more complex than written language (which is meant to be read, and is typically more formalised). Spoken and written variants are, by definition, different. And yet one wants to move the language forward, in a way, before the time is ripe. But then, with over two million speakers, how much longer can one wait? This article reports on the building of a new Lusoga corpus, nearly half of which consists of transcribed oral data. The writing problems encountered during the transcription effort are given detailed attention. Dealing with those writing problems in lexicography requires a multipronged approach. While most could be solved by laying down a norm, and thus through prescriptive lexicography, others need a more cautionary approach, and thus descriptive lexicography. Others still can only sensibly be solved when the lexicographer proposes certain options in defiance of existing norms and assumptions, at which point proscriptive lexicography needs to be called in.

This article proposes a lexicographical approach to the compilation of multilingual concept literacy glossaries which may play a very important role in supporting students at institutions of higher education. In order to support concept literacy, especially for students for whom English is not the native language, a number of universities in South Africa are compiling multilingual glossaries through which the use of languages other than English may be employed as auxiliary media. Terminologies in languages other than English are developed by translating English terms or coining new terms in these languages to exploit the native language competence of most students. The glossary project at the University of Cape Town (UCT) which was conceived under the auspices of the Multilingualism Education Project (MEP) is discussed. It is shown that the UCT glossaries are compiled using methods consistent with those employed in modern lexicography or proffered in lexicographical theory. The lexicographical function theory is specifically used to account for the glossaries and their production. It is suggested that modern lexicography can provide useful guidance for the production of glossaries, given that the earliest glossaries constitute the humble beginnings of lexicography.

This article is a critical evaluation of lemmatisation strategies for nouns and verbs in isiZulu with specific attention to the problem of stem identification. The presumed target users of dictionaries compiled according to these lemmatisation strategies are non-mother tongue learners of isiZulu. The advantages versus disadvantages of lemmatising verbal and nominal stems, verbal and nominal stems without suffixes, and nominal words will be considered mainly in terms of the entire paradigm containing the verbal root -sebenz- from an isiZulu corpus. The conclusion reached is that word lemmatisation is preferred over both stem lemmatisation and lemmatisation of stems without suffixes. It will be argued that the problem of stem identification can only be solved in electronic dictionaries and the electronic dictionary isiZulu.net will be analysed in this regard.

One of the many implications of the process of language democratization which started post-1994 in South Africa is the empowerment of the previously marginalized South African Bantu languages to become languages of higher functions, i.e. languages of learning and teaching, and also of scientific discourse. This in turn implies the development, consolidation and especially standardization of terminology for each of these languages, and the compilation of LSP dictionaries. This article describes the terminological processing of a technical source text prior to translation, which formed part of the compilation of a Quadrilingual Explanatory Dictionary of Chemistry. It reports on the model of terminology management that was utilized and explores strategies for the internal standardization of terms in the absence of readily available, standardized chemistry terminology.

A frequent and well-known problem within lexicography is the use of various terms to denominate the same phenomenon as well as the use of the same term to denominate various, completely different phenomena. Such a non-systematic terminology may lead to confusion in the discipline and hamper its theoretical and practical development. The problem is especially severe within so-called pedagogical lexicography. A short panoramic review shows that especially the terms "pedagogical lexicography/dictionaries", "didactic lexicography/dictionaries", "school dictionaries" and "learners' dictionaries" are used with a lot of different meanings that vary from author to author, from country to country, from culture to culture. Although publishing houses could hardly be expected to use a strict terminology for their products, this should nevertheless be expected from theoretical lexicography. In order to overcome the present confusion, it is therefore urgent to establish a typology that can be used as reference by scholars dealing theoretically with the subfield of pedagogical lexicography. The article will first show the amazing variety of meanings addressed to the various terms in the theoretical literature. It will then approach the problem along two different lines: 1) establishing a clear definition of the terms "pedagogical", "didactic", "school" and "learner" in a lexicographical perspective, and 2) referring to the existing practice where the terms are frequently used in a much broader sense than in the theoretical literature. Based upon these considerations, a new and strict typology that corresponds to the present practice of pedagogical lexicography will be presented.

The empirical domain of the subject matter of dictionary research changes, among others, due to the publication of new dictionaries. A noticeable trend seems to be the increasing occurrence of more new elements regarding dictionary structures in the front matter, central list and back matter. This makes dictionary structure more complex. For the theory of dictionary structures this leads to theory-determined dictionary structure problems: If the theory wants to take cognizance of the new developments it has to be expanded and becomes increasingly complex. If it is expanded one can recognise, in the light of the theory, the strengths and weaknesses of the new structural elements. This leads to dictionary criticism. The weaknesses, especially, lead to dictionary structure-determined user problems. In this first part of the contribution theory-determined article structure problems are treated that result from an investigation of an article type not previously examined, i.e. the complex dictionary articles in which two or more structurally identical words belonging to two or more part of speech classes are lexicographically treated. The theory-determined article structure problems prevail because there are no structural concept for articles of this type, no systematic terminology, no typology and partially no means and methods of presentation. The problems are thereby solved that the theory of dictionary structures is systematically expanded and the heuristics extended to provide for the missing elements.

Examples in dictionaries come in many different forms. They may be sentences or phrases. They may be corpus-based or made up by the lexicographer. They may contain the lemma in its uninflected form or they may contain an inflection of the lemma. In some dictionaries the function of examples is to provide contextual support to the meaning of the headword, and in others the grammatical support that they provide is more important.

While there is literature on the usefulness of examples, and on whether examples should be corpus-based or not, there is very little on what makes one example more useful than another. I have set out to find out what sort of examples South African school users identify as most helpful. In this article, I look at whether examples in five South African school dictionaries do provide suitable contextual or grammatical support.
I have constructed a table to classify example sentences according to different criteria. I filled in this table with randomly selected words and their examples which have been taken from five different South African school dictionaries.
The goal of this research is to present characteristics of examples in a way that makes them easier to analyse and compare. This should help lexicographers in future dictionaries check whether they have written or selected the best possible examples for their users' needs.

Landau (1991: 217) stipulates that 'usage refers to any or all uses of language'. It is the study of good, correct, or standard uses of language as distinguished from bad, incorrect, and nonstandard uses of language. Usage may also include the study of any limitations on the method of use, whether geographic, social or temporal. Basically it alerts users that certain terms should not be uncritically employed in communication. This article discusses the treatment of usage in English lexicography. It analyses the labelling practices in six monolingual English dictionaries namely: the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD), the Macmillan English Dictionary (MED), the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE),the World Book Dictionary (WBD) and the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (NSOED). Discrepancies in the contextual usage labelling in the dictionaries were established and are discussed.

Over the past 14 years, Dr Johan du Plessis has become synonymous with Lexikos. When he accepted editorship of Lexikos in 1997, he was still holding the demanding position of Final Editor at the Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal. Suddenly he no longer had office hours: he was more or less permanently at the office.

When lexicographic practice is being modernized in the DR Congo. Note on Nkòngamyakù Cilubà-Mfwàlànsa, bilingual dictionary of Ngo-Semzara Kabuta

Ciluba is one of the four national Congolese languages spoken in the central south of the country. Since the end of the 19th century, it has acquired the status of a written language and up to the present possesses several lexicographic works of which the first, dating from 1881, is a Ciluba-German vocabulary compiled by a German explorer. Nkòngamyakù Cilubà-Mfwàlànsa is a bilingual dictionary developed by NgoSemzara Kabuta, professor of African linguistics and literature at the University of Ghent, with the triple aim of complementing and filling the gaps of the last dictionary in this genre published in 1960 by a Catholic priest, giving an account of the evolution of the language and proposing the standard form for Ciluba so that it could be used in institutional communication, especially in education. Compared with the works of predecessors, missionaries and regional officials, this new reference tool brings several innovations, mainly: the provision of a dictionary in electronic format and paper, the increase of the number of entries from 10 000 to 16 000, the use of a simple, practical and effective orthography likely to help with reading when learning the language, the significant number of parameters and justifications for each entry to make comprehension easier, the addition of a minigrammar, wholly in Ciluba, a way of contributing to the development, promotion and enriching of this language, particularly through grammatical terminology. In spite of the errors owing to its innovative character, this lexicographic work whose merit is, in various respects, unquestionable, is an answer to the call recently made to African, especially Bantu lexicographers for more comprehensive works.

The book On Est Ensemble: 852 mots pour comprendre le français du Gabon (L. Ditougou, 2009) is an important contribution to the history of French spoken in Gabon. However, this work presents some shortcomings from a metalexicographic point of view. These relate to the front matter text, the central list (the macrostructure, the microstructure, the access structure, the addressing structure and the mediostructure) and the back matter text. This article aims to address these shortcomings, and, at the same time, to propose ways that could help improve them.

This book, which is based on the doctoral dissertation of Monika Bielińska, investigates the outer texts of several monolingual learners' dictionaries for German as a foreign language. She maintains that German learners' dictionaries constitute a fairly young addition to German lexicography, the first one only having been published in 1993 by Langenscheidt (1993). This is in stark contrast to countries such as France and England, where the publication of learners' dictionaries has long been established.

This book is the twelfth in the collection of monographs Vertere, dealing with translation and translation studies. It is a revised, augmented edition of Fernández's dissertation submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Translation at the University of Montreal in April 2007.